A sermon preached at Anchorage Presbyterian Church, Anchorage, Ky, on August 6, 2006.

Texts: Exodus 16:2-15 and John 6:24-35

My early years were spent with a Motorola black-and-white television with three channels. That seemed to be enough then. Now I have a cable TV with hundreds of channels. There are multiple channels for sports of all sorts. There is every kind of movie, from family to the bizarre to retro black-and-white. There are educational channels about science, history, travel, and nature. News is covered twenty-four hours a day from every possible viewpoint. And, somewhere, “Law and Order” is on all the time.

Or at least that is what I have been told. We seem to have some kind of unique cable service, because we only get two channels: HGTV and the Food Network. Every day, Rachel Ray, the Barefoot Contessa, Wolfgang Puck, Bobby Flay, Paula Dean, Mario Batali, Sara Moulton, Alton Brown, and the super chef himself, Emeril Lagasse, come into my home with all kinds of interesting dishes. These shows all operate on the assumption that they are satisfying some hunger we have. They hope that whatever meal they grill, bake, boil, or steam is exactly what we are hungry to eat.

I would like to challenge that assumption and offer a remedy. I propose the Hunger Channel. The Hunger Channel would focus on making us hungry. The day would start off with a bacon show that would make us sense the smell and sound of bacon frying in the pan. Following would be a coffee show with the sounds of the percolator and stimulation of the first jolt of caffeine. Of course, there would have to be a show about baking bread. Well, you get the idea. The Hunger Channel would stimulate appetites and the Food Network would provide the remedy.

Hunger is a real problem in this world. Many people don’t get to decide which food they are going to have for supper. Finding food to eat and water to drink is an everyday struggle. One person in eight doesn’t have access to the most basic of foods. Every day, 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes. That is one child every five seconds.

What about these people sitting in front of Jesus? Are they all homeless, landless, hungry, starving? There are a lot of different opinions about their economic circumstances. Most people in Palestine and the rest of the ancient world were subsistence farmers. They were, on the average, about as prosperous as a southern sharecropper before World War One. They eked out of their patch of ground enough to keep themselves fed most days, pay their taxes to Rome and the Temple, and not much else.

That is, if you were the oldest son. If you came later, you were probably landless and had to find a trade or become a day laborer. Many of those ancient palaces and other great buildings were early Works Progress Administration projects to keep the unemployed busy.

When Jesus looks out over the crowd, he sees hard-working people, some who know where they are going to sleep that night and some who don’t. Jesus sees some people who know where their next meal is coming from and some who don’t. And what do they want? Jesus tells them they just want to eat their fill of loaves (Jn. 6:25).

There is an old story about a preacher who comes to town to lead a revival. The various homes compete to feed him. One lady, Mrs. Jones, puts on a huge feast featuring her prized biscuits. The biscuits are passed once, twice, three times to the preacher. When she tries to get him to eat his fourth biscuit, the preacher, who is about to burst, says, “Madam, I could chew it, but I couldn’t swallow.”

These folks in front of Jesus have eaten their fill of loaves. When they found out that Jesus had gone to the other side of the lake, they create a first-century “rave.” They mass around this man who can feed them. And it was a pretty good deal. You sit through the sermon by Jesus. It is followed by a magic show where Jesus takes a boy’s lunch box and feeds 5,000. The best part was that of this was free!

No wonder they followed him.

Jesus, however, is onto them and onto us, thank goodness. He looks beyond their wants and responds to the work they do to satisfy their hunger, and the hunger they are trying to satisfy.

In his book Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, Walker Percy suggests that the French word bourrer, which means “to stuff,” is the source of the English word “boredom.” Jesus tells the crowd, “Do not work for the food that perishes” (v.27). Well, that is just crazy, because all food perishes. It either dies a slow death in the back of the refrigerator or your family devours it like locusts in ten minutes—the Food Network meal that took you four hours to prepare.

Jesus is saying that much of what we do to stuff our lives with bread and goodies does not really satisfy us. Yet, we work, we eat, we sleep—day in and day out. In many ways, we are no different from these first-century farmers, and we wonder why we find life boring. Over and over we chase that mark where we will fill full with life. Over and over again we hit the same walls, miss the same target, and go to bed with a sense of emptiness.

Emily Dickenson said (and I have cleaned it up, since this is a sermon), “It is not one darn thing after another, but it is really the same darn thing over and over again.”

Now, this is not boredom from lacking something to do. In my mother’s house, it was a greater crime to announce you were bored than to break a lamp. She had no patience for boys who could not find legitimate ways to occupy themselves.

This is about the boredom of working 24/7 to stuff your life with emptiness. This is the boredom of going through the motions of living, while inside you are hollow.

Jesus looks at them and says, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (v. 29). Okay, they say, we will believe and we will work for the food that does not perish. But what work are you doing? Moses got manna for his people.

Can’t you see them grinning back at Jesus? Haw, we caught you. For one, we will get in the last word with you, Jesus. We work to believe, and you keep doing those lunch-box tricks. Moses did it for forty years.

And so we are back to their bellies again.

Now we have to be careful from this point in the text. You can read this text with your ear half tuned in and what you will hear is, believe in Jesus and you will never have to hunger for anything. You will be satisfied. No more clipping coupons and no more standing in line at the grocery store. Life will be great.

And I will be satisfied. No more standing in front of the full refrigerator of my life and saying there is nothing to eat. A chicken in every crock pot and a hybrid car in every garage. Hey, I might even get more cable stations.

But that is not what Jesus is saying. The way to stop being hungry for the world and the way to stop being thirsty for the world is to invite God to help us develop holy hungers.

First, we need to develop a hunger to know God—the who, what, why, and where of God. Who is this we find in the Bible? What does Jesus mean when he says that? Why is the Spirit empowering those people? Where is God today in world? The questions are endless and the answers are endless. It does not matter if you are hearing the Noah story for the first time or the one-thousandth time, there is still much to learn.

A couple of summers ago, I read The Preservationist by David Maine. It is a creative retelling of the Noah story. The book moves toward this powerful scene between Noah and his dying wife. That conversation blew me away. Now, I have been a minister for a long time. What if I had presumed I knew all there was to know about the Noah story?

We need to develop an appetite to know God.

We need to develop a hunger to be God’s people in this world.

We need to be starving to be part of God’s justice. We need to hunger to stop the oppression and abuse of others. We need our souls to growl until we have fed the poor, clothed the naked, and stood with those imprisoned.

We need to be famished to be part of God’s peace and reconciliation. We should be hungry to seek out our neighbor, to welcome the stranger and the strange. We should be starving to create community where people can be nurtured and affirmed as the children of God that they are.

We need to be ravenous to show God’s kindness. William Barclay often quotes the little boy’s prayer, “Dear Lord, please let the bad people be good and the good people be nice.” In this world we are all yelling at each other. That clerk at the Seven Eleven probably had not had a nice word said to her all day. This is more than random acts of kindness. This is letting a little bit of the taste of heaven happen through you.

We need to pray for holy hungers. As long as we only allow ourselves to see Jesus’ promise of never being hungry again as a way to appease this world’s appetites, we will miss out on the depth of this gift. We may be full, but we will be empty.

In the Lord’s Prayer we ask for our daily bread. You could take this passage in John and rethink of it as asking for our daily Jesus. We could explore the word manna and expand on it. Manna is from the Hebrew word “manhu,” which means, what is it? Combing these thoughts, we could change the prayer to say something like this:

Give us this day a holy hunger that will be filled by the Bread of Life.

Amen.